“That’s okay. I want to walk.”
“Well, dude,” he said, looking me over, “I’d take it easy if I were you till you get back in shape.” As he raised his sunburnt arms to swing the empty barrel back onto its concrete platform, a pungent man-smell issued from the wet underarms of his T-shirt. “You have a good day,” he called over his shoulder, springing up into the truck and setting off northward to the next yellow barrel.
Already I was tired and hadn’t yet reached the spot where I had panicked and turned around yesterday. But I had to keep walking north till the trash-barrel man finished his round and passed me coming back or he’d see how out of shape I really was.
After Mom left her job at the furniture factory and we moved to the mountain town of Jewel, I entered fifth grade. Then at the end of the year the teacher told Mom I was ready to do seventh grade work if she had no objection to my skipping a grade. She didn’t—it made her proud because she had helped me study that first lonely year in Jewel. She asked me my opinion and I said it suited me. But the seventh grade kids were more developed and must have looked on me as a freak: here was this kid still built like a child and piping up with the right answer every time the teacher called on him in class. At first they called me Baby Wonk. Then when I began to gain weight, they called me Pudge. (“Boy, Pudge sure makes the most of the Reduced Price Lunch Program, doesn’t he?”)
Back in Forsterville where the furniture factory was, my best friend had had a nickname: everybody lovingly called him Wheezer, because he suffered from bad asthma. But to Wheezer, whose real name was Shelby, I was never anything but Marcus.
Just the right distance to make me walk out of myself, Aunt Charlotte had said. I wished I knew what she was trying to walk out of, what kind of debris in her history she needed to sort out. If she came to the island when she was in her thirties, did she have three times as much debris as I had?
One foot and then the other. Remember, each time the water inches closer, you are closer to your goal.
Is it a mirage, that tiny white truck bouncing toward me? No, that’s him, heading south. His sunburnt salute. Way to go, dude. Tide swirling closer now. Pride saved.
Oh no, surely that couldn’t be Aunt Charlotte’s famous cottage, rearing up all broken and ugly in front of me. But it had to be because the island ended here. The town commissioners had been right to want to remove such an eyesore from their ocean view. When Aunt Charlotte first came here, it couldn’t have looked this bad. After all, some cheery tourist had been painting it. And then Aunt Charlotte taught herself to paint and painted it over and over until it became the kind of picturesque ruin people paid money for.
If a house could be a zombie, this grim husk, guarded by those evil-sharp bayonet cactuses Aunt Charlotte warned about and fenced by sagging wire posted with CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT: DANGER signs, would qualify as one. And more than fifty people had paid money to have Aunt Charlotte paint this zombie house to hang on their walls at home! The porch on the south side had been sheared off and some shingles were nailed up against a replacement wall. Had that been the porch where he left a cigarette while his parents were out desperately searching for him?
When I got closer I could view the rest of the house from the front. The noon sun boiled down on its crumpled roof, mercilessly entering a doorway without a door and the gaping window holes on either side. Maybe at dark this place would pass as a picturesque ruin. But the cottage would have to be almost a silhouette to make you want to hang it on your wall.
I was hot and very thirsty. The zombie house offered the only shade in sight, so I wriggled under the wire fence with the KEEP OUT warnings, snagging my backpack and scratching my arm. I cautiously climbed the rotting steps to the front porch, which slanted downward. At least it was cool under the crumpled roof and I could report to Aunt Charlotte that I had “almost” been inside.
I made a kind of lounge for myself on the slanty porch. As its slope inclined toward the ocean, it was like being teasingly tilted forward, just short of getting tossed overboard. Sweat drying on my shirt, I drank my water, then slowly ate my sandwiches, the high tide crashing around me. I would not be ashamed for the sunburnt man to see me now, though in his official capacity he would probably have to order me off the condemned property. (“Because otherwise, dude, I could lose my job.”)
I folded the empty lunch wrappings and stuffed them inside my backpack, which I plumped into a pillow for myself. It was the backpack I had taken to school when Mom was still alive and I sniffed it to see if there were any traces of our old life together in the apartment. There was a faint bread-y smell, but that was probably from today’s sandwiches. The porch beneath the backpack had its own smell of salt and old timber and decay. The ocean was so close I could feel the spray and I felt myself sliding into a nap. Which was okay, I had earned my tiredness. I would rest up before heading back to Aunt Charlotte’s. She was only in the middle of her day and would expect me to be in the middle of mine.
When I awoke, it was out of a dream in which the sunburnt man had been standing in the doorless doorway of the cottage. He leaned lightly against its frame, watching me sleep. I knew not to turn and look toward the door because I would wake completely and I wanted to prolong the way I felt him watching over me. Also, a dialogue was going on between us, though neither of us spoke aloud. We could read each other’s minds. I asked him if he had been inside the cottage and he said yes, he sometimes checked things out to see how bad they were getting. I asked how bad were they, and he said bad enough for this place to come down. When I asked if I could have a look inside, he said that is exactly why I am here, to forbid you to go inside. But why? I wanted to know. Because, Marcus, people who go in don’t always come out. I asked how he knew my name. Because I needed to know it, he said.
***
Now the tide was going out, the sound of the waves more distant. How long had I been curled up on the porch, completely awake? It seemed a while ago that the sunburnt man had been watching over me.
But something still was. I felt its presence by the electric prickles all down my back and by my serious reluctance to move a muscle. Then the reluctance turned to cold fear. There was no way in the world I could muster the courage to roll over and see what was in that doorway.